


The Five Stages of Grief

by SilverMoon53



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Emotional Hurt, Fitz and Coulson are mentioned repeatedly but arent actually present, Five Stages of Grief, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Season/Series 05, because this is more about how each member of the team carries their grief, but i dont think its worth it, i guess i could tag everyones relationships to the dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-16
Updated: 2019-03-16
Packaged: 2019-11-19 10:35:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18134639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverMoon53/pseuds/SilverMoon53
Summary: May is acceptance.Daisy is depression.Mack is bargaining.Yo-Yo is anger.Simmons is denial.The team copes with their grief.





	The Five Stages of Grief

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to my poor texting buddy. I sent them the my assignments as to what stage of grief everyone is and they texted back "djfjkfkg valid" while I was writing out my first draft of May. After I sent them that, they said "oof. these next couple messages are gonna take me down huh" 
> 
> Anyway! I had a lot of fun with this one, so I hope you enjoy reading it!

May is acceptance. 

Coulson is dead. She held his hand as it happened, said her goodbyes. They knew it was coming, had time to prepare, yet that didn’t make it hurt less. It broke her heart but her heart has been broken before, and she knows how to pick up the pieces, knows how to knit them back together. It’ll never be the same, but she’s made her peace with that, too. 

Fitz is dead. She was there for that death, too, but she wasn’t the one to hold his hands. She saw him though, saw his last breath. Saw his hands stop shaking, saw how small he looked, so much like the young agent in a coma from all those years ago. There would be no waking up for him this time, however, and there had been no time to say goodbye. He hadn’t seen it coming. No one had. 

Fitz is different than Coulson, though. There are plans to get him back, something about time travel and alternate selves. It feels cold to say it, but she doesn’t put much stock in theories like that. The Fitz she knew had died, and had been buried, and she had said her goodbyes to him, too. If they got him back, then all the better, but she would rather a pleasant surprise than the agony of hope. 

She is left with the unfeeling reality: the people she knew are dead. There is nothing more she can do for them. But the rest of the team remains, broken and traumatized, and needing her. She can still help them, so she lets go of those she can’t. Her head is up, her shoulders are straight even as she bears the weight for those who need her to. She keeps moving, keeps marching steadily forward, because that’s who she is, that’s what she does, that’s all she knows. She stopped when it happened, let herself mourn and cry, then packaged it up and let it go. There is no changing the past, there is only facing the future. The hurt stays. Sometimes it grows, sometimes it fades, but it always stays. 

May keeps going, grief her comfortable companion.

 

Daisy is depression. 

Her life has always been one loss after the other. Family and friends and lovers, all have come and gone, and she is always, always, _always_ , left alone. Each loss hurts a little bit more, bruises a little deeper, chips away another part of her. She is a riverbed, slowing getting washed away, powerless to stop it. 

Coulson is dead. Knowing it was coming, getting a chance to say goodbye, didn’t make it her feel less alone. She had lost family before him, bounced from foster home to foster home, watched her birth father kill her birth mother less than a year after she met them, found companionship with the parasitic Hive, but all that pales to losing Coulson. He was the only constant for so long in her life, the only family she knew would stay, and then he was gone. 

And Fitz… She doesn’t let herself think about him. He can’t be gone, he just _can’t_ , the universe may be uncaring and cruel, but it can’t be that bad, it just can’t. Not when she never had a chance to forgive him, not when he had finally gotten married, not after everything he had been through. So she promises to find him, and refuses to mourn him, even as it eats her up inside.

She lets the hurt in, gives it a home, nurtures it. She’s been losing her whole life, she knows how to grow the hurt into something more. She keeps it inside, tucks it into her cracks as they form and falls apart in her room. She doesn’t let the others see her sadness, can’t bear the guilt of adding to anyone’s pain. The agony fills her up until it’s all she knows, then it spills over and out and consumes her and she lets it. She smiles and laughs around others because it’s an easy enough lie even when no one believes it. 

Daisy suffers, letting the grief swallow her whole as it has always done. 

 

Mack is bargaining. 

He is simple in his beliefs. He thinks that good begets good, and that the world, despite the pain and the flaws, is fair. He believes in even trades, that the universe will balance itself out, even if it needs some help from time to time. 

This is a time he needs to help. The team is unbalanced, without a leader, and his feet might be large but they still feel too small to fill the shoes Coulson left behind. He fills them anyway, because it’s the role he needs to fit, the way he can help. He may not want to be leader, but he’s good at it, and the team needs a good leader. 

He’s good at dealing with death, too, or at least somewhat experienced. Coulson is easy to say goodbye to, he lived a long and full life, they all knew his death was coming. Coulson spent his last days in peace with the love of his life, and that makes it easier to let him go. But Fitz?

He had held Fitz’s hand as he died. Fitz hadn’t known, hadn’t realised, hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye. Fitz’s death was sudden, unexpected, painful. Painful in more ways than one. 

He remembers his daughter's deaths, both of them. Her first life, the one that ended before it began. Her fake life, which somehow feels far more real. He holds Fitz’s hand as he dies and relives Hope’s death. He thinks of Fitz and remembers Hope, and how part of his hope had died when his Hope had died, and how maybe the rest of it died with Fitz. 

It’s hard, but he does what he needs to do. Life moves on and he keeps trying to even things out. Telling her, though, that’s the hardest part of it all. He had to, he owed it to both of them, offered to help her through it. He’s been where she was, knows how it feels to lose a loved one, knows what it’s like to offer your soul to get them back. But he knows there’s no trade to make, that the devil is in the details and the devil always wins.

So he keeps going. A new deal is struck, a new debt to pay, new negotiations, new plans, new people. He keeps trading, keeps trying to think of new ways to help. The dead can’t be saved but he’ll be damned if he lets any more of his friends join those ranks without a fight. He trades sleep for productivity, trades the comfort of a garage for the gears of an organization, trades hope for desperation. New trades with space exploration companies, new under the table offers to black market techies who might know something.

Mack keeps trading and trying and searching, desperate to balance the scales of his grief.

 

Yo-Yo is anger. 

She’s always been aggressive, always been one to fly headfirst into danger, but the fire in her eyes is different, now. She’s never been a stranger to the injustice of the world, to the reality of corruption and hatred and suffering. She’s seen death before, she has blood on her hands, and while she would never claim to be numb to it, she had thought she at least understood it. 

She feels guilt around Coulson’s death, for having spent many of her last days with him waiting for him to die, to break the time loop. She had tried to stop the others from saving him, and she will carry that guilt for the rest of her life. She feels guilt at the reason she misses him, longing for someone to understand what it’s like to lose a hand. She misses him for other reasons, of course, because he was a good man and a good leader and a good friend, but the guilt fills her anyway and she fights until it drains away in pools of rage. 

Fitz’s death, though, Fitz’s death she blames herself for. She was the one to introduce the idea of invincibility. She was the one who insisted that they couldn’t die, when the opposite was true. The only guaranteed way to break the loop would be for one of them to die, she should have known that, should have seen that. Her synthetic hands are stained with his blood, and she will never let herself forget.

But she’s never been one for sitting still, for letting emotions stew. She’s a woman of action, of getting things done, of constant movement. Sitting around missing the dead won’t get anything done, so why waste time? 

She spends her time fighting instead, fighting enemies, fighting her friends, fighting herself. When there is no battle going on, she heads to the training room. She brushes off anyone’s concern, claiming she’s still just getting used to her arms, sneaking back to the punching bag as soon as they look away. She spends hours a day training, pushing herself until she forgets how to breathe, rage ghosting around her like her own phantom limbs. She burns, inside and out, a raging fire that shows no sign of dying. 

She’s lost parts of herself and fights to get them back, fights to feel like she did before. It’s selfish, and petty, to hate the others for their own loss, because they’ve all lost and she knows that. No one left standing is whole, but they’re all broken different than she is and she hates them for thinking they understand. 

Yo-Yo fights through her grief, because there’s always a war going on and she’s always been a fighter. 

 

Simmons is denial.

Oh, she knows it happened, knows that it was all too real, but that’s all she’ll admit. She insists she’s fine, she’s okay, there’s no need to worry about her, really. She pushes others away with smiles that seems too whole to be fake, too broken to be real. She smiles and nods and laughs and jokes and goes on with her life, and she seems so normal on the surface. She’s gotten very good at lying over these years, and spends each new day honing her craft. She does not flinch when she hears his name, does not cry at the sad memories but laughs at the happy ones. There is no anger in her, no bargaining, no depression, no acceptance. Just cold detachment from herself and her feelings. She does not break or bend, even in private, and keeps lying to herself and others.

The others worry about her, but no one knows how to approach her about it. She’s always been a little closed off, a little off in her own head, but it’s different, now. She’s colder, almost, and there’s something threatening hidden in her eyes. She’s quieter, in a way, speaking only when spoken to and answering in short sentences, though her voice remains strong and steady and whole. She’s stronger, in all the wrong ways, spending sleepless nights in the training room, working away with a blank face, unblinking even as sweat drips into her eyes. 

She’s whole, but she seems as though she was put back together wrong. The pieces are all there, but they stick out, jagged and sharp. She pushes others away, gentle nudges they don’t even notice until they try to reach out and get cut. Her smiles become bared teeth, daring any who see it to ask if she’s okay. Of course, she’s okay. Nothing is wrong. What’s happened is over and done, she does not need to talk about it. Leave her alone, now, she has work to do. 

Simmons builds walls, a castle of grief, and locks herself away in it.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, feel free to come find me on my social media!  
> Writeblr blog: @silverssideblog  
> Discord: cloudcover#7167
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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